Everyday Comics #1 (Special Features)

As promised, here is some behind the scenes stuff for last Monday's cartoon:

1) Once I had the idea or sorted I knew I wanted to base the image off and actual comic book cover, like what I did for the Wanking Dead comic. Except this time, I thought I'd try and copy the cover as much as possible and just add some details in there. Now it did take me some time to actually find a decent cover surprisingly, pretty quickly after I started I knew it had to me a Superman cover, as it just seemed to fit. Especially as a lot of earlier Superman covers seemed to be him just lifting and busting out of stuff. So after spending some time with my old friend Google Image search, I found this beauty:

Which was just perfect, especially the way he has his arms and hands positioned and I also knew I could pull this one off as the background was really simple!

2) Once I had my image, I did a quick sketch to get the layout and text all sorted:

So you can see where I've played around with the "Everyday Comics" logo, and made a note that I'd have to do the "Shoppingbag" by hand, why? Well I honestly couldn't find a free font that was even close, which is odd.

3) Next I sat down in front of my PC with the original Superman cover on the screen and spent quite a while coming up with this pencil drawing:

4) Because I copied this as close as I could to the original I was worried that when I added the extra stuff in, like the shopping bags and logo, if I stuffed them up then I may ruin the whole thing. So to fix this problem, I grabbed some tracing paper, stuck it over the top and just added in all the extra stuff, which looks like this:

All I had to do after this if lay both the sheets on top of each other on my light box (It's a big box with two fluoro bulbs in it and a glass top so I can trace pencil drawings onto my good inkjet paper) and just trace both at the same time onto inkjet paper.

5) Once it was traced I then went and inked the image using various ink pens (Sharpie Fine Point, Bic Mark It Ultra Fine Point, Staedtler Triplus Fineliner and a Copic Multi Liner 0.1 to be exact) to come up with this:

6) Now is where the fun begins and the magic happens; I scanned this image into Photoshop and cleaned it up (I messed around with his face as well as I wasn't happy with it, in fact I'm still not) and coloured it and made the background transparent. I then imported the image into Illustrator where I used quite a few layers for each object. So all the text was separate, as was the background gradient and all those damn lines. Man those lines took some time and patience I tell you. So finally we get this:

I hope you all liked it, I had a lot of fun doing this one, hence why I'm now planing some more "Everyday Comics" cover soon!

Mike

  

Everyday Comics #1

Hello! Well, file this one under the "I've always wanted to do it, but put if off because it would take to long". Now that I've finally done this I want to do more! Sucker for punishment aren't I? I'm looking at doing some more "Everyday Comics" as it was fun and I already have more ideas for the theme! As you may know, I'm a massive comic nerd so it definitely appeals to me, especially as this image is an almost exact copy of Superman #1. Which, now that I think about it, I might do another Wednesday night "special features" on this one, as it took quite a bit to do it and there was quite a few different elements there as well. So look out for it, I'll show you the original image I copied then. 

So if you have any suggestions for more "Everyday Comics" ideas, throw them my way! As with this one, all of them shall be copies of actual comic book covers....because it was fun to do, and I think it's cool.

So how did I get this idea in the first place? You'd never pick it, but it was from a random meme posted on someone's Facebook awhile ago. Something about how bad-ass you feel when you carry all your groceries in just one trip. It's amazing where an idea can come from hey? Originally it was going to be called "Everyday Superheroes" but I had some ideas that didn't quite fit into that theme, so I broadened it a bit so I can have villains and use other comics like war and horror ones. I'm actually kind of excited about this! I'm getting lots of ideas and I really keen to do some more, the only real issue is just how long it will take to do one. But as with everything, the more I do, the better I'll be at doing them.

Alrighty then, I'm off see you on Wednesday!

Mike